Sharing information in a collaborative setting is an important aspect of many professional and social interactions. Managers and staff collaborate on projects, sales people make presentations to potential customers, attorneys negotiate dispute resolutions, and family members share photographs of memorable events in their lives.
The means for exchanging information can be as simple as paper documents or pictures arranged on a table top. However, computer technology has evolved from providing a stationary resource located on a desktop in the office or home, to a highly mobile resource embodied in such devices as laptop computers, personal digital assistants (PAD's), and cellular telephones accessing digitized content, e.g., text, images, videos, etc. There, the content can be displayed on the device itself for private viewing, or on a public display areas for shared viewing. However, in such collaborative interactions, the ‘owner’ of the content may want to retain some control of how the content is manipulated for display, and how the underlying content is accessed and modified.
Green berg, et al. In “Interactive PADS and Shared Public Displays: Making Personal Information Public, and Public Information Personal,” Personal Technologies, Vol.3, No.1, 1999, describe a number of prior art systems that exchange electronic content in collaborative environments.
Generally described, those prior art systems set rigid and simplistic rules for categorizing content as either public or private. Further, they fail to enable fast, efficient methods for sharing the content. Conventional interactive systems do not provide an effective means for interacting with the content because the strict nature of the categorizations limit the access to certain content. This limitation arises because those conventional systems have only two modes of operation, a private mode and a public mode. A single participant often generates the content only for private use. Occasionally, some of the content is made available for public use. However, when the content is publicly used, the owner has, in most cases, absolutely no control over the manner of public use.
In view of these limitations of prior art collaborative systems, there is a need for an improved method and system that allows multiple users to interact with and share electronic content in a collaborative setting.